SpeechPro, the U.S. subsidiary of Speech Technology Center, has entered a strategic partnership with DataWorks Plus, a provider of law enforcement solutions to more than 500 law enforcement agencies throughout North America and New Zealand. Through the partnership, SpeechPro will supply the voice recognition tools of its VoiceGrid SDK to add 1:N voice matching capabilities to DataWorks' law enforcement software application platform.

"We are extremely pleased to welcome DataWorks Plus as a SpeechPro strategic business partner. They are a proven leader in the law enforcement software application market, and their use of the VoiceGrid SDK and integration of the technology is a testament to the potential for adoption of voice recognition technology by U.S. law enforcement agencies," said Alexey Khitrov, president of SpeechPro USA. "We are confident that as law enforcement agencies explore new modalities for their biometric identification processes they will recognize the value that voice recognition can bring to helping solve cases, including kidnapping, extortion, organized crime, and gang-related activities, terroristic threats, and domestic abuse, just to name a few."

"When we learned about the capabilities of the SpeechPro VoiceGrid technology, we were naturally intrigued and felt it was a new biometric modality that merited further investigation," said Brad Bylenga, president of DataWorks Plus. "Upon obtaining the SDK we were able to quickly integrate the voice recognition tools into our application. The developer documentation was clear, and when we did require some guidance, SpeechPro was quick to respond and resolve our issues."

In addition, SpeechPro and DataWorks have received a commitment from a U.S. state justice agency to implement a pilot voice recognition system by the end of the year. The system will serve initially as a test platform to assist all the stakeholders in developing best-practice procedures for obtaining voice samples at the time of booking and to assess the operational processes, accuracy, and value of the system going forward.

In 2010 SpeechPro successfully deployed the world's first nationwide voice-based identification system for the government of Mexico. It is the largest voice biometric identification project to date.